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Vanuatu’s president wasn’t entirely wrong when he blamed human-induced climate change for the ferocious cyclone that killed at least 11 people as it tore through the island country with winds topping 250 km/h on the weekend.

But President Baldwin Lonsdale wasn’t entirely correct, either.

“One thing is for sure is that the sea level is higher in those islands because of climate change,” said Kerry Emanuel, professor of atmospheric science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, Mass.

Fierce cyclones, he said, often bring storm surges, which can look like a tsunami but are driven by winds, not an earthquake.

With climate change resulting in higher sea levels, both tsunamis and storm surges will be higher “and cause more damage. In that sense, climate change did play a role,” said Emanuel, who specializes in hurricane physics.

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But to actually analyze climate change’s impact on a cyclone is trickier. For one, he said, “we don’t know how strong these storms really are. We are guessing, based on appearance of the storms on the satellites.”

The cyclone that hit Vanuatu was an intense storm “but we can’t really put a number on it, and that makes it hard to say, for example, if it was the most intense storm we have measured in the South Pacific.”

Vanuatu, a volcanic archipelago located about 1,750 kilometres east of Australia, has a population of about 270,000 people spread over 65 islands. About 47,000 people live in the capital of Port Vila.

Cyclone Pam hit the remote archipelago late Friday night local time, flattening structures and cutting off electricity, water supply and phone lines, say reports.

Research has shown tropical cyclones are becoming stronger in many regions and lasting longer. They are also bringing a lot more rain. However, the southwest Pacific, where Cyclone Pam struck, wasn’t one of the areas studied, due to a lack of data.

John Smol, who holds the Canada Research Chair in Environmental Change at Queen’s University, said the general consensus is that the number of high-intensity cyclones has been increasing over time and that rise is linked to an increase in manmade emissions.

“It’s a double whammy. Warmer temperatures are increasing the intensity of cyclones while rising sea level is creating even more destruction,” said Smol.

There is an undisputed link between emissions and rising sea levels, which have left Vanuatu vulnerable. Scientists are also confident that climate change has an influence on temperature extremes.

For instance, the Australian heatwave of 2013 — also known as the “angry summer” — would have been virtually impossible without the influence of greenhouse gas emissions, according to Climate Council, an independent, crowd-funded Australian agency.

Tom Pedersen, executive director of Pacific Institute for Climate Solutions in Victoria, B.C., pointed out that the sea surface temperature in February in the region between New Caledonia, New Zealand and Fiji was between 1 C and 2 C above the long-term average.

Vanuatu is close to that triangle.

“Australia has gone through a record hot summer and that whole area has been really hot,” said Pedersen. “There has been a lot of energy in the ocean and that will have contributed to the strength of Cyclone Pam.”

Ironically, Vanuatu’s president was attending a United Nations disaster risk conference in Sendai, Japan, when Cyclone Pam struck.

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